At Chickasaw Park on Thursday, duPont Manual sophomore Marion Whitfield slid across the clay tennis courts, ready for the balls flying at him.
Designed in 1923, Chickasaw was the first Olmsted park for Black Louisvillians and it featured tennis courts.
As a child, Whitfield started out playing basketball. But people at the West Louisville Tennis Club encouraged him to pick up a racket four years ago. He now plays for his school and said he’s the only African American player on the team.
“For the most part it's a joy, you know,” he said. “I just stop thinking about everything else and I just focus on the sport and I put all my stress to the side.”
He said any moments of stress are worth it. Whitfield is teaching his younger brother to play and enjoy the game. He said he wants to be a coach someday. Australia’s Nick Kyrgios is his favorite player.
“He's a lot like me, you know, he's a hothead. He's really loud. So somebody like me playing on the big stages, you know, kind of inspired me to play,” he said.
Louisville’s Olmsted Parks Conservancy is expected to receive $50,000 to benefit the tennis courts. The African American Cultural Heritage Action fund is awarding grants to 30 sites across the country.
Jesse Hendrix, the conservancy’s communications director, said the money would go towards interpretive signage in Chickasaw Park, including the tennis courts, and programming for the tennis club.
“West Louisville Tennis Club is one of our most important park user groups. So we wanted to focus this on how we can support the programming that they do,” she said.
Aretha Fuqua has been president of the West Louisville Tennis Club since 2017. The club provides free evening clinics for youths and adults, offers thousands of dollars in scholarships to players and pays for professional coaching under the juniors program. It also has a traveling team of players who compete in regional tournaments.
Fuqua remembered being introduced to tennis by the man who would become her coach in 1984.
“His name was Arthur Lloyd Johnson. And he kind of looked at me, he said, ‘Girl, you got them long legs, you got them long arms, you gotta put it to use,’ and he gave me a tennis racket,” she said.
She kept coming back to Chickasaw Park to play.
Fuqua said it’s also a place for kids and seniors to meet and learn from each other.
“I just wanted to make sure that the club is stable, and that we've got a generation of kids who's going to come behind us to keep this legacy alive and the history alive,” she said.
She said tennis is often considered an elite and exclusive sport, and the West Louisville Tennis Club grew from the need to increase access. Traveling to competitions, buying equipment and practicing at clubs can be prohibitively expensive.
Players and families have to pay even more to participate in United States Tennis Association leagues, receive professional coaching or enter USTA-sanctioned tournaments.
“We thought, and I still believe it's so true, you take away that discriminating factor. And then what you have is equal playing grounds,” Fuqua said. “And that’s what we try to create.”
The West Louisville Tennis Club is located within Chickasaw Park, 1200 Southwestern Pkwy. The club offers memberships for families and individuals.
Correction: A previous version of this story misspelled Arthur Lloyd Johnson’s name.
